BEBOPS How to Include a Reference / Citation

back to How To

On this page we will see how to include References / Citations. This is a little tricky, if you don't feel up to it then just write the citation into the page and update the page BEBOPS How to Flag a Page as needing some Help and someone will tidy it up for you.

What is a Reference / Citation?

Reference and Citation are two ways of describing a tag that can be inserted into a page to document where the information came from. If you look at Wikipedia pages you will see these all over the place.

Why include References / Citations?

Because this is a site that is presenting historical information it is important that the source of the information is documented to validate its authenticity. For example if we were to say that John Smith was the publican at the Hand and Racquet (a regular haunt of Tony Hancock ) in 1856 and we got this information from the 1856 Voters Register then this source needs to be recorded.

How to include References / Citations

There are two ways that citations can be included

• A single reference to the citation within the page or
• Two or more references to a single citation within the page

Single Reference / Citation in a page

You may have noticed the little "1" next to Tony Hancock above an the little "2" next to Voters Register. These are both single references to a citation for the evidence that

• Tony Hancock was linked to the Hand and Racquet pub and
• the Voters list evidence is on page 2 and the original used is located at Bucks Archives.

The citations are listed at the bottom of the page.   

To insert the citations is a little fiddly. As said above, if this is not for you just write the citation into the page and add info to the Help page and someone will tidy it up for you. These are the steps

• Click on the more (...) at the right end of the edit ribbon. This will open the second ribbon
• Click on "View and Edit Wiki Text" for which the icon looks like [[]]
• This will open an editing window which contains the page in mediawiki markup script
• At the point where you need to include the citation use one of the below formats
  • for text only citation for information from a book <ref>Title, Author, Date, Page</ref> or
  • for text only citation for information from a document <ref>Document Name, Date, Page, Location of Document </ref>
  • for website link where the link is to be displayed <ref>[[Websiteaddress]] </ref>
  • for a website link where different text is to be displayed <ref>[[websiteaddress alternative text]]</ref>
• Towards the end of the page (at the end but before any categories) insert

= Citations = <reference></reference>

Although this is not needed to force the citations to be displayed at the end of the page it does give them a heading and control where they are displayed.

Multiple use of the same Reference / Citation in a page

For multiple use of the same reference the syntax is similar to that used for a single citation for the first instance, it just needs a name to identify the citation This name is then used for the second and subsequent citations. There is just one entry in the citation list at the end of the page.

Examples

For single citations see the citations in the section "Why include References / Citations"

For multiple uses of the same citation below are examples of the first use of the citation and then the syntax for second and all subsequent uses.

Multiple citations, First use

<ref name="fred">Title, Author. Date Page</ref>

Multiple citations, subsequent uses

<ref name="fred"></ref>